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T206 Honus Wagner Card, Wikipedia

In middle school, I had a dollhouse. It was a four-bedroom colonial with a center staircase. My grandmother and great aunt bought two-inch furniture for it. Every Christmas and birthday, my collection grew-- a canopy bed, a wing chair and, one year, an electrified lamp—the light was dim, but still bright in my mind.

Meanwhile, as I created my tiny empire, my two brothers collected 3.5x2.5-inch Topps baseball cards. As a blasé sibling, I saw the trades, the disappointment of duplicates, and sometimes, the accusations when a card went missing. My younger brother remembers, “you had to hide them.”

The packs usually came with a checklist of players and the goal was to collect every player by the end of the season. “It took forever,” said Kate Thomes, who in 1974 was one of the first girls to play Little League in the U.S. “We put rubber bands around the keepers and made little tee-pees for our hamsters to run through with the extras,” said Ms. Thomes. “We did it all the time. We didn’t have computers.”

It was a thing. Sports memorabilia dealer and president of Tary Enterprises Jerry Zuckerman recalls being out and about with his baseball cards. “You bought them, carried them in your pocket, played with them, flipped them and traded them. It was part of a routine,” said Mr. Zuckerman.

The cards even inspire sensory images. “You got on your bike, stuck one in between the spokes of your wheel and it made a clicking sound. We didn’t care about value,” said Mr. Zuckerman.

For kids today, collecting baseball cards is “a dying passion,” said Michael Heffner. The president of Lelands.com, the auction house that bought the record-breaking 4.4 million Babe Ruth jersey, went on to lament, “Now you can buy the complete set of cards at Wal-Mart.” The older cards still get plenty of interest. Twenty-seven lots of vintage cards, (in the “sports and non-sports card category”), are on sale at Leland’s online auction. The auction, which began May 18th, ends tonight at 9pm. Mr. Heffner estimates the sale from those lots alone to be $100,000.

What is a baseball card worth? “It’s worth what someone’s willing to pay,” said Mr. Zuckerman. For the holy grail of baseball cards, the “T206 Gretzky Honus Wagner,” Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick paid about $2.8 million in 2011. The 1909 card, manufactured by The American Tobacco Company, owes its value to the Pittsburgh Pirate himself who was arguably the greatest shortstop in baseball history.

Legend and hearsay also played a key part in its desirability. Ironically, tobacco-chewing Wagner forced the tobacco company to pull his image from the card because he did not believe in promoting cigarettes to children. Perhaps what Wagner really objected to was the lack of compensation for his image. Either way, only 200 were released, making his card very rare. Mr. Zuckerman said, “It’s speculated there are only 50 Wagner T206s around.”

One of the few men alive to own the card, Michael Gidwitz jumped at his opportunity to buy it at Christie’s in 1996 for $640,000. “It’s not very often someone gets the chance to buy the very best of anything,” he said.

The time to sell came three years later when the fun wore off. “It was so small I couldn’t keep it in the house. To see it, you’d have to make an appointment with me and we’d have to go down to the Harris Bank and go into the vault,” said Mr. Gidwitz. He sold the card for $1,265,000. “They said I was a fool when I bought it and a genius when I sold it.”

For Debra and Daniel Colvin, owners of a thrift shop in Port Townsend, Washington, the discovery of a rare baseball card brought a thrill. After her mother-in law died, Ms. Colvin was going through papers and found a war ration coupon and a baseball card with the name of Henry Reccius. She photographed the card and forgot about it.